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A comprehensive analysis of the false-positive problem in SVD-based image watermarking

  • 1187: Recent Advances in Multimedia Information Security: Cryptography and Steganography
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Abstract

In recent years, two similar formulations have been proposed for semi-blind robust SVD-based watermarking. Several research articles reported some faults in those formulations, which are known collectively as the False-Positive Problem. Other researchers investigated different aspects of this problem from different viewpoints, and proposed solutions to overcome the faults. This paper, first categorizes those researchers’ viewpoints into three groups, and shows that while focusing on certain aspects of the two algorithms, they did not succeed in finding the real cause of the False-Positive Problem. Secondly, this paper locates the actual cause of the faults of the two algorithms by directly examining the formulations. Our experiments show that the algorithms fail to correctly embed a distinguishable part of the watermark into the cover image. Further analysis shows that the algorithms embed some arbitrary data in the cover image, and send most of the watermark data as the side information in a semi-blind watermarking setup. Finally, this paper reviews the existing solutions to the False-Positive Problem, and shows that the correct solution to this problem is embedding the principal component of the watermark into the cover image.

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Correspondence to Narges Safizadeh.

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Safizadeh, N., Ahmadi, S.H.R. A comprehensive analysis of the false-positive problem in SVD-based image watermarking. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 22275–22295 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-15248-6

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